The Wait

by Frank Turner Hollon

  I asked him, “Where you been the past decade?”

  “Well, let’s see,” Jake said. “I been married twice, fixin’ to be three. I spent a little time upstate after my fourth DUI. I got me a damn good job now, and I gained fifty pounds. That’s about it.”

  I lied and told Eddie and Jake I had to be somewhere. The fallout continued in directions I hadn’t envisioned. My two best childhood friends, and I couldn’t trust either one of them to have a simple beer and a simple conversation at a bar. I left them sitting next to each other, and I knew when I walked away I’d never meet with either one of them on purpose again. I walked out and got in the car. I sat there thinking about the Mexican kid and the idea of fate. The idea that, if I left the parking lot ten seconds later, or ten seconds earlier, I might find myself in the path of a dump truck running a red light, or find myself not in the path of a dump truck running a red light, and how do I know when to start the car, and when to pull into traffic, and how fast to drive to avoid the dump truck that may not exist, or may very well crush me in my car on the way home?

  Reasonable doubt. The very foundation of the American judicial system. A standard a jury must utilize to

  determine guilt or innocence. If you have reasonable doubt, a doubt for which you have a reason, then you cannot, according to the American judicial system, declare someone guilty. The standard, of course, exists to protect the innocent, but also harbors the well-organized, the well-prepared, the man willing to sacrifice. Maybe one of those sacrifices would be Eddie Miller and Jake Crane. Maybe the sacrifices would never end. Gretchen, then eventually Samantha, and finally, myself. Maybe fate would take it off my shoulders.

  I wanted to marry Samantha immediately. I wanted her next to me every night, but it couldn’t be done. A wedding so soon after Allen Kilborn’s death would brighten the spotlight on me and Samantha. Her focus since the funeral had been on Allen Jr., which is where it belonged, but it left me utterly alone night after night on my porch smoking cigarettes in the dark.

  I was finally allowed to talk to Gretchen on the phone. Her voice sounded like she was in the bottom of a deep hole. At one point in the conversation she called me “Early.” I knew she’d been calling the old man “Dad,” but she rarely slipped anymore. The worst part is, when she slipped on the phone, she didn’t even catch it. It went right on by, the low voice from deep in the hole mumbling something about feeling sick, or not being able to miss cheerleading practice. After she called me “Early” it didn’t matter anymore.

  My mother called. “Why isn’t Gretchen coming to visit?”

  I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t say it.

  “She’s sick. She can’t miss cheerleading practice,” I lied.

  “That’s a lie, Early. What’s going on?”

  I hesitated. “They filed something with the Court to suspend my visitation.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “It’s Kate, fuckin’ with me. Taking advantage of the situation. They told the judge I was a suspect in the murder of Allen Kilborn.”

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “No,” I nearly yelled. “No.”

  There was silence on both ends of the phone. I could hear her breathing.

  “What about me, Early?” Christine asked.

  “What?”

  “What about me, Goddamnit? Me and Gretchen? Our relationship? Forget about you for a minute. Why do I suffer because you end up in screwed-up situations? I miss the girl. Every day. She’s my best friend.”

  More fallout. More unintended consequences. It didn’t seem to make any difference if I got caught by Frank Rush or not. Even my mother would end up hating me. My father would know what to do. If he was still alive, things would be different. I would have married a nice, pear-shaped, stable girl from a stable family and lived securely in a well-built house. No savior complex. No drug addicts or courthouse marriages. No rich stepfather or abrasive ex-husbands. Smooth sailing, it would have been, if only my father had left the parking lot ten seconds earlier, or ten seconds later, crossing the tracks ahead of the train. It was just a matter of moments, like it’s always been, and like it will always be.

  Strangely, as the weeks passed, and then months, I felt a change in Allen Jr. Before it was always them against us. Little Allen and Big Allen against me and Samantha. The lines were clear. Now, he was just a boy. A boy without a dad. His dad died and left him alone with his mother, and me. The man who hangs around his mother.

  “Are you gonna play baseball this year?” I asked.

  We were sitting in the living room. Me in the chair and Little Allen on the couch. Since his father died, the boy was quiet most of the time, just like I’d been.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  It was getting late. Samantha was in the bathtub. Every night, before Allen went to sleep, I said goodnight and went back to my house. He had enough to deal with in his world without seeing me walking around the house in my underwear or imagining me and his mother doing it in the bedroom.

  “I think you should play. If you want, we’ll go look for a new glove. You need a new glove.”

  He looked at me as I spoke, like he was seeing me for the first time. He didn’t respond to the comment about the baseball glove. We sat quietly for a minute. I raised up in the chair to leave.

  Allen said, his eyes staring at his hands, “You don’t have to go home every night. You could stay here some nights.”

  It made me smile. It was justification, small, but justification nonetheless. Before, he would never have considered such a thing. I was the enemy. Not anymore. Now I was just a guy. A guy who liked baseball, and anybody who loves baseball can’t be all bad. No matter what they’ve done.

  eight

  On the third ring, I said out loud into the phone,

  “Pick up the fuckin’ phone.” Before I’d finished the sentence, somebody picked it up. There was silence, and then Kate said, “What if Gretchen had answered?”

  “Sorry,” I said, and I was actually sorry. The frustration was maddening. To have no control over something so important, so simple as having somebody pick up the phone on the other end of the line.

  “Nobody answers over there, Kate. I’ve called ten days in a row. I can’t talk to your machine anymore.”

  Kate said, “We’ve got caller ID, Early. Gretchen can tell who’s calling.”

  There it was. What I didn’t need to hear. “Don’t say that. Even if it’s true. What pleasure could you possibly gain in saying that? You should see what it’s like to be on this side. Why don’t you send Gretchen down here? You can have three visits a year and maybe we’ll pick up the phone, maybe not, and I’ll be sure to rub it up in your face whenever I get the chance.”

  There was silence again.

  “Don’t hang up,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure she was still on the line.

  “I’m getting married,” I said.

  There was nothing do but wait for her to answer.

  “To who?” she asked.

  “Samantha.”

  “The dead man’s ex-wife?”

  “Yes. But it doesn’t have anything to do with Allen Kilborn. She’s a good mother. She’s got a boy Gretchen’s age.”

  It was strange, but Kate’s voice still held me. There was something pleasant inside of it. I wondered if it was the voice itself, or some memory attached to it. If I’d never met her before, would the voice make me feel anything beyond the words?

  “Will it be a big wedding?” she asked, revealing more curiosity than I expected, and maybe more than she expected.

  “It didn’t start out that way. At first we just had a list of about twenty people. A month later, it was two hundred. Now we’ve got two cakes, a band, shrimp.”

  She laughed. “A little different than the first time.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A little different. I think that’s why Samantha wants the whole show. She did it like ours the first time.”

  It was the most normal conver
sation I’d had with Kate since the day she lost her baby. Our baby. The baby inside her that died and made her hate me.

  “I want Gretchen to be in the wedding,” I said.

  “I’ve got a court order.”

  “I know what you’ve got. I haven’t seen her for eight months, Kate. I’m gettin’ married. She’s my daughter. I can’t wait until she turns nineteen and then hope she sends me a Christmas card every year. Hope I can undo nineteen years of unanswered phone calls.”

  I tried to keep the tone of my voice level. Frustration seeped out between the sentences. I took a deep breath, soundless, so she couldn’t hear my desperation.

  She said, “Did you kill that man, or what?”

  “What do you think, Kate?”

  She didn’t answer, and I imagined her standing in her high school home next to the man in the chair with the hole in his foot, a dim light and a dog at the screen door. A bottle of vodka by the chair. I could see it plain as day. She was wearing a dirty white apron.

  “Is your dad still alive?” I asked.

  I’m not sure what I meant by the question. Maybe I meant to remind her she had no relationship with her father, and maybe that was part of the reason she’d been so screwed up. And how could she want the same thing for Gretchen?

  She finally said, “If Gretchen’s going down there, I’m going with her, and we’re staying in a motel. I’m gonna be there with her at the wedding, too.”

  It was unsettling on a number of different levels. Ex-wife at the new wife’s wedding. Mostly it was unsettling to me personally. If her voice still held me, how would I feel about her in the same room? At my wedding? But I was in very little position to challenge. Another court battle could take months, and money set aside for other things. Just another conciliation in the great compromise. Wishing I’d left her on that damn street so many years ago didn’t help, because there’d be no Gretchen, and then I’d have no idea at all what I’d lost.

  “Okay,” I said, and we ended the conversation.

  People gathered in the church. I stood in a back room at the mirror with Allen Jr., tightening our tuxedo ties. I couldn’t stay still.

  “Are you nervous?” he asked.

  I wanted to be the strong, silent type. I’m sure his father never looked nervous a day in his life. “Yeah, I’m a little nervous,” I confessed.

  Allen said, “I would think the nervous part would be asking a girl to marry you. That’s when you really make the promise.”

  He was right. The hard parts were over. Minutes later we stood together at the altar waiting to watch Allen’s mother walk down the aisle with her father on her arm. My eyes scanned the faces in the crowd. People from work. Not really friends, just people who work in the same place. Allen’s grandmother on his father’s side. Her face hard like her son’s face had been. My mother, Christine, her eyes on Gretchen across the aisle from me. And Frank Rush, the investigator, his face near the back, uninvited. We looked at each other, and I moved along to the next face, and the next, but I felt my chest tighten, the breath stopping at a shallow point in the top of the lungs, refusing to go down deep.

  I glanced at Little Allen, and he smiled up at me. He seemed genuinely happy about the marriage. His smile gave me comfort, and I realized that his was the only face in the crowd to bring the feeling. In the far side of my field of vision I saw Kate. For the past two days I’d managed to avoid the moment, but now there was nowhere to go. I didn’t have the endurance to look away. She was beautiful. A woman now, not just a lost skinny girl with no home. Her presence made me weak in my legs. A moment longer, even one more moment of looking at her, and something bad would have happened. Instead, the music started, and my new wife turned down the aisle as pretty as any bride could be, her elderly father smiling wide just like the boy next to me, while the stained-glass Jesus looked down upon all of us.

  And it happened again. Only for a few seconds, but it definitely happened again. I saw myself from Allen Jr.’s eyes. It was just a blink, the side of my head, the wedding song, and I could feel what he felt. An excitement. Not nearly as clear as with the Mexican boy, but real just the same, and I was grateful for the interruption this time. Not as shocked as before.

  At the reception I focused on Samantha. All the other distractions had no place in the day. When I slipped away to the bathroom I thought I’d found a minute to smoke a cigarette and clear out my head. I was wrong. Before I could get the single cigarette out of my inside jacket pocket, Frank Rush came through the door. If it wasn’t an accident, he sure made it seem like one.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  I washed my hands. “Thanks.”

  It was like he was the gym teacher, and I was the kid who smoked cigarettes in the bathroom, and he almost caught me.

  He stood at the sink, washing his big hands.

  “I just wanted to see it for myself,” he said.

  I played along. “See what?”

  “See if you could go through with it. Standing up there next to that boy. Knowing how much he loved his daddy.”

  We looked at each other in the mirror. I decided not to say anything.

  Frank Rush dried his hands on a brown paper towel. He never took his eyes away from me.

  “I know you killed the man, Early. I know it down in my bones. We can’t prove it yet, but we will. Sooner or later you’ll tell somebody, or the gun’ll turn up, or your wife and Little Allen will figure it all out, and I’ll get a call, like I always do. And when that day comes, I think you’ll be glad to get it over with. You don’t seem like a bad man to me. Hell, maybe we’re all better off without that abrasive son-of-a-bitch around anyhow.”

  The bathroom door swung open. Eddie Miller walked in. He stopped dead still. There was a minute when we all looked at each other. I almost laughed. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know why. It just seemed so ludicrous, the three of us standing in the bathroom together.

  “Hey,” Eddie said.

  “Hey,” I answered. I turned and left.

  Maybe, like I said before, it was fate. Leaving the parking lot ten seconds too early, or ten seconds too late, and getting pulverized by a train, except in my case, it was extreme violence so close in time and location to my conception. Maybe somehow the sound waves of the violence, the gunshot and the blood spatter against the wall, traveled through the small space of air from the window to my mother’s womb, wobbled the egg sac somehow. Maybe I would kill again, and again, and no one would be safe around me, including Samantha or Little Allen or Kate or Eddie Miller. Or maybe I was right in what I did. And there’s a place for violence, controlled violence, in a civilized world.

  I drank too much champagne at the reception. Everywhere I turned there was stilted conversation with the mother of the man I murdered, or Frank Rush eating a piece of chocolate cake, or Kate’s red dress on the other side of the room. So I drank another glass of champagne, and another, and for some godforsaken reason I decided it would be funny to snap a picture with somebody’s disposable camera up the skirt of a stiff, middle-aged woman with black hair and a tight bun on the back of her head, until she turned around at exactly the wrong moment. And her husband saw me do it. And then somehow somebody apologized to somebody else and Samantha and I were whisked away to our honeymoon to have sex, anytime, in almost any way I wanted, for four days and four glorious nights. That’s the way I remember it.

  PART III

  middle-aged anarchy

  one

  Our lives are not defined by the wide radical swings, but instead, by times in between, the leveling off. After the death of Allen Kilborn and my wedding, I tried very hard to smooth out my life into normalcy, the daily routine of living. After all, that’s why I did what I did, so Allen Jr. and Samantha could level off. So our lives would not be wide radical swings every day.

  The first step was committing myself to my career like never before. I was in my late thirties, a time in a man’s life when he should hit his stride. Working for a nat
ional investment company had it advantages, I suppose. There were plaques on my office wall. Corporate trips to San Francisco and New Orleans. If I jumped through the right hoops I got a bonus, or a new title, or a call from some big shot in Seattle who told me I was “the lifeblood of the organization. The personification of the values that set the company apart from competitors.”

  I remember sitting at my desk staring at the back of the closed door for God knows how long. I remember feeling I was on the verge of slipping into some sort of cataleptic state, able to hear and see the world around me, but unable to make the decision to move a muscle.

  The voice from the phone said, “You’re the kind of man who moves this business forward, Early, and I don’t just mean the business of our company. I mean the stock market itself, the free enterprise system, America. You’re innovative, energetic, willing to work outside the lines, and you’ll be rewarded in the short run, and of course, in the long run.”

  The words were like morphine. A dead warmth spread through my body. I remember saying, “Do you mean Heaven?”

  The voice hesitated. “Heaven?” it repeated.

  “Yeah, the long run. Do you mean all my innovation and hard work will get me into Heaven? Eternity with God and all the other people who earned a spot?”

  The voice hesitated again and said, “Well, I was thinking more along the lines of district manager, but I suppose God likes hard work. It certainly can’t hurt.”

  The back of the office door was off-white, the color of margarine. It looked good enough to lick, shiny. I began to imagine, in my cataleptic state, with the voice purring in the background though the phone, what it would be like to become part of the door, virtually melt into the off-white black hole of another object, until the voice said in a slightly louder volume, “Congratulations, Early Winwood.”

  “Congratulations to you,” I said, which of course made no sense at all.

  My relationship with Allen grew in direct proportion to the deterioration of my relationship with Gretchen. He looked forward to seeing me in the afternoons. We talked about sports. I taught him the secrets of baseball. Gretchen wouldn’t return my calls. On one rare occasion when she answered the phone she told me she hated the idea of me sleeping in the same bed as Samantha.